Fighter Heroes of WWI: The untold story of the brave and daring pioneer airmen of the Great War

These were man-lifting Boxkites, which Cody intended to sell to the military authorities for use as observation posts. Over the years, Cody progressed from kites to airships to aircraft, and in October 1908, his flying machine, powered by an Antoinette engine, flew for a distance of 1390 feet. One of his first flights is remembered by Edward Bolt, an NCO with the Royal Engineers Balloon Section at Farnborough:

He was doing practice flights for a long time before he got off the ground. I remember one of his flights when I was one of the markers. He circled for a mile and there were twelve of us stood there with flags until he’d completed his circuit and landed. We all came towards the machine and Cody said to our corporal, ‘Here’s a pound! Take these men to the Queen’s Hotel and buy them a drink! That’s the only pound I’ve got left …’

In May 1909, John Moore-Brabazon (who later proved an old adage by flying a pig in his passenger seat) became the first British man to fly an aircraft in Britain. Five months later, he collected a prize of £1000 offered by the Daily Mail to the first person to fly a circular mile in a British aircraft. Recalling this event, Moore-Brabazon describes it as ‘the real start of the British aeroplane industry’. Despite his achievements, there were many in Britain, including Lord Northcliffe, owner of the Daily Mail, who were worried that the country was falling dangerously behind its rivals. The newspaper attempted to rouse public concerns, by announcing that Britain was ‘no longer an island’, and it offered a new prize to the first pilot to fly across the English Channel. On 25 July 1909, the prize was won – but not by a Briton. Louis Blériot, a Frenchman, flying his own monoplane, flew from Calais to Dover in thirty-seven minutes. Northcliffe’s fears concerning British vulnerability appeared justified. ‘The British people have hitherto dwelt secure in their islands … but locomotion is now being transferred to an element where sea power is no shield against attack,’ warned the Daily Mail. Describing Blériot’s achievement with barely a hint of sour grapes, Moore-Brabazon comments:

He rather gallantly and very luckily crossed the Channel in a monoplane tractor with a three cylinder air-cooled engine that never before or after – even when copied – ever ran so long. His success was due to running into a very big shower of rain that cooled his engine when in sight of our shores.

Lucky or not, Blériot’s achievement hastened British aircraft development. Across the country, engineers and mechanics began to adapt their skills to the design and construction of flying machines. Frederick Handley-Page was eventually to become a celebrated aeronautical designer, responsible for the first heavy British bombers which flew towards the end of the Great War, as well as the Second World War Halifax bomber. At first, however, he was working out of a shed in Barking, with a coppersmith, Charles Tye, as his sole assistant. Tye recalls meeting Handley-Page in a pub:

One Friday night, the barmaid said to me, ‘Charlie, the gentleman sitting down there with a beer is looking for a coppersmith who can use a blowlamp.’ So I looked round and saw Handley-Page. I went across to him and he told me he was opening up a workshop and was building a ‘machine’. I didn’t know he meant an aircraft. But I went down to his workshop, where he only had a little coke brazier. There were two benches with wing spars that would take the wings of the monoplane that he was building, but apart from that, the shop was bare. He had no tools whatever – only a plane and some chisels. So we started to build the machine together. I was making all the fittings. I was brazing pieces of tube onto plates that would take the struts. As we went on, we took on a carpenter called Cyril who made the ribs and the longerons. By the time the aircraft was finished, there were a dozen of us working on it. We called it Yellow Peril because the wings were covered in fabric and doped in a yellow cellulose material.

Other great aeronautical companies were also setting up. The Avro company was formed by A. V. Roe, a marine engineer from Manchester, who had made detailed observations of birds while at sea. In June 1908, four months before Cody’s maiden flight, Roe almost took to the air in a machine of his own design, but he never quite made it off the ground. Geoffrey de Havilland – who would one day design the Mosquito, the Second World War fighter-bomber, and the Comet, the world’s first jet airliner – began work on his first aircraft in the same year, in a shed off the Fulham Road in London. He flew the machine, eighteen months later, from a hilltop on the Hampshire Downs. It took off, flew for thirty-five yards, and crashed. De Havilland suffered only cuts and bruises, but the machine was wrecked.

A crucial boost to designers arrived in 1909 with the introduction of the French Gnôme rotary engine. Rotary engines had a better power-to-weight ratio than conventional engines, they reduced vibration and they were far more efficiently cooled, due to the rotation of the cylinder block around the crankshaft. Copies of the Gnôme engine were soon produced, and powered flight became a far more practical proposition.

It was not long before flying gripped the British public’s imagination. In 1910, Claude Grahame-White, a motorcar dealer, established an aerodrome at Hendon in north London – nowadays the site of the Royal Air Force Museum. ‘London Aerodrome’, as Grahame-White called it, quickly became a venue for aerial displays and joyrides for day-trippers. Eric Furlong was a young man, living in Hendon, whose interest in flying was sparked by visits to the aerodrome. He remembers:

Clarence Winchester was a freelance pilot with his own aeroplane giving joyrides to people for something like £1 a time. He used to put the passenger in the aeroplane and then start frightening them by telling them that they mustn’t touch this, that whatever they do, they were not to lean against that, that wire was absolute death if they got tangled up in it. By the time they took off, the passenger was jelly. When we asked him why he did this, he said, ‘Well, they think they’re getting their money’s worth if they’re really frightened …’

On Sundays, Frederick Handley-Page would send his aircraft, Yellow Peril, down to London Aerodrome, where its pilot would give joyrides. There was one man who refused to take a ‘flip’, however, as Charles Tye recalls:

Every Sunday, we used to take people up for trips. From Hendon, round Hyde Park and back. I don’t suppose the trip lasted more than ten minutes and we used to charge a guinea. One particular Sunday, Handley-Page was there himself and I saw him talking to the actress Gladys Cooper. We hadn’t had a customer for a while, and the pilot, a man named Whitehead, said to me, ‘I wonder if Miss Gladys Cooper wants a trip? Go and ask! And if she doesn’t want a flip, ask Mr. Page if he’d like one. I don’t think he’s ever been in the air before!’ So I went over and just stood aside Mr. Page while he was talking to Gladys Cooper. ‘What do you want, Charlie?’ he asked. I said, ‘Mr. Whitehead is sitting up there and he’s getting fed up. Is anybody coming up?’ He said, ‘No!’ So I said, ‘Well, he says he’d like to take you up as he doesn’t think you’ve been in the air before!’ He looked at Miss Gladys Cooper and he took me aside and whispered in my ear, ‘You go back and tell Whitehead – I build them. I don’t bloody well fly them!’

For a number of years, the military authorities in Britain had financed the development of airships while leaving aircraft production to private enterprise. However shortsighted this may now seem, the fact was that early aircraft could not reach high altitudes, they could not carry great weights and they could not fly at night or in high winds. Airships could do all of these things. They were also considered rather more genteel than aeroplanes. Robert Pigot recalls an agreeable morning spent aboard an airship, while serving with the Royal Flying Corps in 1913:

I was living about fourteen miles from Farnborough, where I was stationed, and one morning, I thought I’d go home for breakfast so I flew my airship over and circled round my house until the butler came out. He fetched the gardener. The two of them pulled me down and tied the airship to a tree at one end and a garden roller at the other. And I went in and had breakfast.

Over time, as aircraft became sturdier and more reliable, the military authorities began to take them more seriously. A 1911 report of the Committee of Imperial Defence declared that aeroplanes could ‘keep army commanders in the field as fully informed as possible of the movements of the enemy’. The idea of entrusting the role of military reconnaissance to a fleet of flying birdcages was unsettling to the armed forces. It was particularly unsettling to the cavalry, whose job reconnaissance had always been, and who still dominated the War Office. There was not yet any official expectation that aircraft could contribute to military operations, drop bombs, or engage in air-to-air combat, but there was now the prospect of a role.

The new thinking was reinforced in April 1911, with the establishment of the Army Aircraft Factory (later renamed the Royal Aircraft Factory) at Farnborough. Under its Superintendent, Mervyn O’Gorman, the Factory assembled a team of designers, who were immediately hampered by the limitations placed on the Factory by its charter, which stated that it could not manufacture new types of aircraft, merely produce conversions from existing aircraft. Geoffrey de Havilland joined the Factory as a designer. He describes how it was possible to circumvent the Factory’s restrictive charter:

We weren’t supposed to design new aeroplanes but we could reconstruct them from a landing wheel or a few old bolts from a crashed machine. In this way, during my time at Farnborough, we designed and built several new aeroplanes. When I’d been at Farnborough for about a year, we designed the BE1. We did it by taking a small part of a broken-down French Voisin and reconstructing it into something totally different. The BE1 was quite a successful aeroplane but it was unstable – meaning that you had to control it all the time. I was not very interested in stability until Edward Busk, who had studied the theory of stability, joined the Factory. He took the BE1 and applied his knowledge to modifying it in order to get stability. He moved the lower plane back about three feet, which was equivalent to moving the centre of gravity forward, he fitted a bigger span tailplane, he fitted a fin in front of the rudder and we ended up with a really stable aeroplane. It was quite astonishing to be able to get into this machine, after the unstable machines of the early days, and fly around with hands and feet off indefinitely. That machine eventually became the BE2c and it was really the start of practical, stable aeroplanes.

The Factory produced a series of aircraft, each classified by type. The first type, designated BE (Blériot Experimental) was a ‘tractor’ biplane, with the propeller at the front of the aircraft. This is the type described by de Havilland. The second type, designated FE (Farman Experimental), was a ‘pusher’ biplane, with the propeller behind the fuselage. A third type, with the elevators at the front, was named SE (Santos-Dumont Experimental). The final type produced by the Factory was the RE (Reconnaissance Experimental). Different versions of these types constituted the Factory’s output throughout the Great War.

As the Army Aircraft Factory came into being, a body of men was needed to fly the new machines. On 1 April 1911, the Air Battalion, Royal Engineers was created. Consisting initially of 14 officers and 150 other ranks, it was decided that officers could join the battalion from any arm or branch of the army but that the other ranks must come from within the Royal Engineers. Pilots would not be trained ab initio, however. Prior to joining, they would have to learn to fly at their own expense, before being reimbursed on acceptance by the Air Battalion.

While the British High Command could not see beyond the possibilities of aerial reconnaissance, Germany was proposing a far more aggressive function for its airborne fleet. The Germans considered the Zeppelin airships superior to any weapon possessed by any other nation. General von Moltke, the Chief of the German General Staff, announced to his War Ministry that ‘its speediest development is required to enable us at the beginning of a war to strike a first and telling blow, whose practical and moral effect could be quite extraordinary’.

On 13 April 1912, the Air Battalion was superseded by a larger organization: the Royal Flying Corps. This was intended to join together, under a single umbrella, the army aviators of the Air Battalion with a group of naval aviators who had been running their own flying school at Eastchurch, on the Isle of Sheppey. The Royal Flying Corps comprised a military wing, a naval wing and a Central Flying School at Upavon, on Salisbury Plain.

Doubts were expressed about the location of the Central Flying School. The area around Upavon was prone to dangerous air currents, which had brought down many aircraft over the previous few years, causing the area to become known as ‘The Valley of Death’. Another issue was the status of The Royal Flying Corps. As a corps, its leaders would be subordinate to those in the established services, guaranteeing it little say in its own destiny. Nevertheless, it appeared that unity had been imposed on the world of British military aviation.

That unity did not last very long. The Admiralty was not keen to hand control of its flying matters over to an army corps. It therefore rejected the idea of a ‘naval wing’ and announced the formation of the Royal Naval Air Service, under the command of Murray Sueter. This unilateral decision went entirely unchallenged, leaving the Royal Flying Corps to represent the army alone – although, officially, the Royal Naval Air Service did not come into being until July 1914. Philip Joubert de la Ferté, an early member of the Royal Flying Corps, who was to fly one of the first two ‘shows’ of the war in August 1914, remembers the divide between army and navy:

The Admiralty never really accepted the recommendations of the Committee of Imperial Defence. They didn’t want to be organized by the War Office in any way. They paid lip service to the royal warrant for a period of years, but they went along in their own way. When the Royal Flying Corps was formed, Brigadier General David Henderson took the military and naval wings under his charge. He was an authority on reconnaissance – he’d written a book on reconnaissance. He was a soldier, not an airman. Looking at an aeroplane, he could only imagine flying over an enemy force at low speed so that you could literally count the men on the ground. He believed that there should be no aeroplane with an engine more powerful than it should have a speed of more than 100 miles per hour in the air. The Admiralty, on the other hand, was looking into the problem of fighting and offensive operations in the air. It was fully alive to all the possibilities and it wanted bigger and faster aeroplanes than were thought necessary for the army. The navy took a much broader view.

The intention of the War Office was that all military aircraft would be built by the Royal Aircraft Factory but the Admiralty began to turn to private enterprise to design and build its machines. While it was hardly satisfactory that the infant British flying service should consist of two rival organizations, it at least meant that, eventually, a greater choice of aircraft and engines would be available to both branches. Once the war had begun, this would prove crucial.

At the date of its formation, the Royal Flying Corps had only eleven aircraft in active use. An up-to-date, reliable machine was needed that could be produced by the Royal Aircraft Factory. To this end, Military Aeroplane Trials were held on Salisbury Plain in August 1912. The machine which most impressed the judges was designed and built by Samuel Cody. Handley-Page’s assistant, Charles Tye, was present:

I was in the next shed to Cody. All the hangars were built by the government and they wanted a machine for the Royal Flying Corps. There was about fifteen sheds. A. V. Roe had one, Martinsyde had one, we had one, Samuel Cody had one. I used to do a bit of work on Cody’s machine – I used to true it up for him now and again. When I had trips with him, I sat on a bicycle seat behind him with my hands on his shoulders. His machine was a pusher type with the prop behind. We used to call it the ‘Cathedral’ because it was so huge.

The trials were that you landed on a ploughed field and you got off again. The only thing was that every machine that landed on that ploughed field couldn’t get off again. Cody was the last one to land on this ploughed field and it had been raked up so much by the time he landed. He had a son with him and I was there too. Cody was sitting up at the top of this machine while the inspector was testing his tank and testing all his controls. When Cody had word to get off, his son called out ‘Look!’ What he’d seen was that there was a space in that field that was nearly bare. The machines that had been trying to take off previously had flattened down the ground. It was like a steamroller had been over it. I believe that if Cody had landed first, he wouldn’t have got off that ploughed field.

Although he won, Cody’s machine was never taken up by the Royal Flying Corps. N. V. Piper remembers why:

In 1912, I was lent to Cody and I worked with him, building a replica of the machine that had won the military trials, the sale of which was part of the prize of those trials. Major Raleigh smashed the replica on a very short flight. He’d been flying an aircraft that had been sluggish on the controls but the Cody was hypersensitive, particularly on the fore and aft control. So he crashed it. We rebuilt it and brought it back, but in the meantime the machine that had won the military trials crashed, and it was decided to drop the Cody machine.

Instead of Cody’s machine, the Royal Flying Corps adopted the BE2, the machine worked on by Geoffrey de Havilland at the Royal Aircraft Factory. A year after the Trials, Cody crashed his machine on Laffan’s Plain. Edward Bolt was present:

Cody took up a passenger, a man that came from Reading. Leon Cody and I were watching and all of a sudden, the machine started wobbling and we could quite clearly see that the passenger was grabbing hold of Cody’s shoulders, which I am sure caused the crash.

Frederick Laws, an NCO with the Royal Flying Corps, ran over to the crumpled aircraft, where he found both Cody and his passenger lying dead. Cody was fifty-one years old. Remembering him, Laws comments, ‘I wouldn’t say he was unbalanced – but he was erratic.’ Erratic he may have been, but with his tireless enthusiasm and air of self-invention, Cody embodies the age of the pioneers. At his funeral, his importance as an aircraft designer was recognized. James Gascoyne, a Royal Flying Corps mechanic, was a wreath bearer:

Cody’s funeral was a very, very ceremonial affair. It lasted about two hours, I suppose. It was an enormous gathering of civilians and soldiers.

Shortly after the Military Trials, in September 1912, the British army held its annual manoeuvres, in East Anglia. During the exercise, a red army, commanded by Sir Douglas Haig was soundly beaten by a blue army, commanded by Sir James Grierson. The deciding factor in Grierson’s victory was his use of aerial reconnaissance. One of Grierson’s aircraft, piloted by Lieutenant Arthur Longmore, with Major Hugh Trenchard (a name to remember) as his observer, spotted the advance of Haig’s troops and immediately reported its findings. Grierson, meanwhile, had hidden his troops from observation, remarking afterwards that he had ordered them ‘to look as like toadstools as they could and to make noises like oysters’. The blue army’s victory, apparently inspired by Lewis Carroll, ensured a role for aviation in a future war.

While the ‘military wing’ concentrated on preparing for the role of reconnaissance, the ‘naval wing’ trod a more experimental path, prompted by Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty. Churchill, always open to novel ideas, had been an early supporter of flying. Philip Joubert de la Ferté remembers:

Churchill had become First Lord of the Admiralty in 1911. He got to hear of the activities at Eastchurch and he decided that he should take some interest. Not only did he take an interest, but he learnt to fly. He was a perishing pilot, most dangerous, but he did it and he got to know something about the air, and it was his authority and his enthusiasm which got the Royal Naval Air Service off to a tremendous start.

The Admiralty began investigating the most effective methods of bombing ships and submarines, although not always with sufficient flexibility. In 1912, Victor Goddard, a cadet at Dartmouth Naval College, witnessed the invention of a fellow cadet:

Cadet Robinson had devised a bombsight which allowed for the drift of the aeroplane in the air, and also for its forward speed of flight. This was something which was new to me, and I think it was new to the whole world. At any rate, he was almost certainly the first person to submit a bombsight to a government department. The reply from the Admiralty was that their Lordships saw no application for this invention.

Nevertheless, their Lordships examined other interesting possibilities, including the bombing of longer-range targets such as German airship bases. The navy felt vulnerable to Zeppelin bombing, as their own bases were to be found along the coast, and so a chain of air stations was constructed from which naval airships and aircraft could strike out against enemy raiders. As a result, the Royal Naval Air Service was to become responsible for the defence of the mainland from aerial attack in the forthcoming war.

As the prospect of a European war became more real, it was very clear that aviation would have a part to play, if, at first, only in an observational role. Nevertheless, that prospect ought to have been sufficient for the politicians and generals to predict an aerial escalation. To send an aircraft up to spy on the enemy is to invite preventative measures, and the simplest way to prevent an aircraft from spying is to send another aircraft up to shoot it down. Every aircraft would therefore need the means to defend itself. This had all been foreseen in a Royal Flying Corps training manual, produced a few months before the outbreak of war:

It is probable that one phase of the struggle for the command of the air will resolve itself into a series of combats between individual aeroplanes or pairs of aeroplanes. If the pilots of one side can succeed in obtaining victory in a succession of such combats, they will establish a moral ascendancy over the surviving pilots of the enemy, and be left free to carry out their duties of reconnaissance.

Taken a stage further, if an aircraft is capable of observing the enemy in its activities, it is surely capable of disrupting those very activities by dropping bombs. Yet every aircraft that went to war in the summer of 1914 was completely unarmed and unprepared to carry arms of any kind. When asking why, it should be remembered that at the outbreak of war aeroplanes had been flying for less than eleven years. They were not yet sturdy platforms for guns or bombs. They were flimsy contraptions, liable to tear themselves to pieces if handled roughly or landed steeply. And they were deliberately flimsy in order to minimize the weight of a craft that was breaking the laws of nature by taking to the air in the first place. Aeroplanes were still mistrusted for their very novelty. It was to take a war to demonstrate the extraordinary potential of the flying machine.

If there were still military doubts about the machines, there were also doubts about the men flying them. Many of the early flyers had been daredevils and risk-takers, non-conforming young men who valued adventure above duty, individuality above discipline. Edward Peter was such a man. Charles Tye remembers how, in 1912, Peter had jumped into Handley-Page’s precious machine and made off: